Tag Archives: Books

Books! Or, life behind the best-seller curve

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blackwater Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army, by Jeremy Scahill.

This longish book is the kind that gives you the waking quakes — how did we let this happen? Author Jeremy Scahill takes readers on an in-depth tour of the growing empire of Blackwater, the Bush-favored mercenary corporation that is best known for its military roles in Iraq and  post-Katrina New Orleans.

Blackwater, according to Scahill, is willing to go where the money is: war, peace-keeping, spying, financial cover for grasping bureaucrats. Blackwater is a very handy corporation to have around. It allows the government to go places it could not go with conventional forces and do things it could not do — some of which might be considered immoral or illegal to the average voter — with the regular military. Blackwater happily recruits its for-hire soldiers from veteran forces of some of the most human-rights abusing regimes on earth.

Blackwater is everywhere these days, according to Scahill’s book, which was updated last year. Residents of a small California town defeated the company’s efforts to open a “Blackwater West” in their community, but “Blackwater already annually trains more than 25,000 military and state, federal, and local law enforcement personnel at its Moyock (North Carolina) headquarters. It also successfully established ‘Blackwater North’ in Illinois.”

These days, Blackwater is manufacturing military hardware, spying for corporate America, gathering intelligence for the government and fighting our wars, all without the oversight that would accompany more traditional performance of those duties.

Blackwater and other private military companies have made themselves a very important part of the defense establishment. Scahill’s book makes clear just how dependent the Pentagon has become on its for-hire proxies. It will be interesting to see if President Obama will try to rein them in, or whether Blackwater and its ilk already more powerful than the commander in chief.

Jeremy Scahill on Bill Moyers

Books! Or, life behind the best-seller curve

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I’m not even too many years behind on this one. It was published in October.

Marcia Muller is a mystery writer I’ve been reading since the early 1990s when her detective, Sharon McCone, was in her thirties. Now, 18 years later, she is somewhere around 40, if memory serves. Why can’t we all age like that?

In this particular adventure, Sharon is depressed….soooooo sad. So she flies the plane she owns with her wonderful husband to the ranch she owns with her wonderful husband to take a long vacation, ponder what to do with her successful detective agency, and feel sorry for herself.

Very, very irritating. Hey, McCone! Get your head out of your navel! Other people have real problems!

Fortunately, a few people get murdered and McCone comes out of her blues. It wasn’t really clear to me why McCone came out of her blues, if her exit was connected to her investigation or not. It seems like one day she was moping about and the next day she had her life pretty well figured out.

The truth is I’ve been reading Marcia Muller books out of habit for a long time now, reluctant to give up on a series I’ve followed for so long (sort of the same reason I still buy every Sprinsteen album). There are better mystery plotters than Muller and better mystery writers as well. It’s fun, though, to watch McCone detect her way through the decades, changing but semi-ageless. I sure hope she’s done feeling sorry for herself, though.

Books! Or, life behind the best-seller curve

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At first I was very suspicious of Reading Lolita in Tehran.

I delayed, afraid of one of those well-reviewed books that nobody actually finished. It is, after all, a book about books (sort of) by an Iranian college professor of English lit.

God, the dullness danger was high.

But I got sucked in pretty early and stayed there til the end. Author Azar Nafisi combines literature — Lolita, The Great Gatsby, Invitation to a Beheading and other towering works — and memoir to tell the story of her life in Iran during and after the revolution. She writes of oppression and morality police and the eight-year Iran / Iraq war and her children and her inability to accept the place established for women by the authorities. It is a stunningly well-written story and treatise.

To some, though, the book is politically incorrect.

From Wikepidia:

Nafisi’s book has earned some criticism by Columbia Professor Hamid Dabashi who sees the book as basically being propaganda for the Bush administration to attack countries like Iran and Iraq. (The Chronicle of Higher Education, October 13, 2006) Dabashi wrote a critical essay in the June 1 edition of the Egyptian English weekly Al-Ahram. In it, he used the late literary scholar Edward Said’s work on Orientalism to critique Nafisi’s memoir as evidenced in this quote: “By seeking to recycle a kaffeeklatsch version of English literature as the ideological foregrounding of American empire, Reading Lolita in Tehran is reminiscent of the most pestiferous colonial projects of the British in India, when for example, in 1835 a colonial officer like Thomas Macaulay decreed: ‘We must do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern, a class of persons Indian in blood and color, but English in taste, in opinions, words and intellect.’ Azar Nafisi is the personification of that native informer and colonial agent, polishing her services for an American version of the very same project.”

Wow. Wonder what Nafisi did to Dabashi to deserve that.

The Washington Post in 2004 ran a piece that said the then-new book already was outdated and was not widely read by Iranians.

The problem, several Iranians said in interviews, is that Nafisi left Tehran seven years ago. Her highly personal account of 18 years living under the mullahs is as absorbing a history as might be found of this place in that time. But it ends precisely at what most people here call the dawn of a new era in Iran, the 1997 landslide election of Mohammad Khatami as president….

In the end, Khatami failed to change the structure of Iran’s government, which today remains dominated by clerics who answer only to themselves. But his election, and the landslides that followed for reformists, represented titanic public rejection of the suffocation Nafisi made so vivid in Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books. She used 343 pages and uncommon eloquence to describe the intrusion of the state (using the justification of religion) into every element of daily life.

But, but, but… “Reading Lolita” is and always has been a history, not current events. History doesn’t get outdated. It gets memorialized. And Nafisi does tha beautifully.